Thinking about all those lovely Pyu beads made me dig out this humble little one, which is both jade and gold. It comes from a late-bronze-, early-iron-age site in northeast Thailand, Nakhon Ratchasima province. Other material from the site has been carbon dated to 500-200BC. It's a piece of "jade", 23mm long by 5 or 6mm thick, that has obviously been salvaged from something larger that broke - a bracelet probably. Then somebody drilled a hole in it to turn it into a bead or pendant and it split down the middle - disaster! So they repaired it with a gold plate on either side, and gold bolts. It gives a sense of how valued the jade stone was. (Though it may not actually be jade in our sense of the word. As Jamey has pointed out, what passed for jade - "hin yok" in Thai - in early Asian cultures, was often quartz or serpentine.)
To me it's a needed corrective to our own disposable culture, which repairs less and less.
Will
PS: sorry about the terrible pictures - bad camera and terrible photographer, I'm afraid!